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So Unusual for a Theater Tunesmith

“I look like what’s-her-butt, from ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ ” Cyndi Lauper announced in her pipsqueak voice. She checked herself out in the mirror in her foyer, surrounded by framed platinum records. Though she talks with the panache of a 1940s movie moll crossed with a character from “Goodfellas” — all dames and broads and outer-borough curse words — she didn’t resemble even a profane Norma Desmond. In head-to-toe black, save for a leopard-print sweater and a tight cap over her hot pink hair, Ms. Lauper, the singer of enduring hits like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “True Colors,” mostly looked like what she is, a pioneering rocker.

It was a Wednesday, and she was heading from her apartment in the Apthorp building on the Upper West Side, walking a few blocks to the Beacon Theater to see her friends Tegan and Sara, the twin indie-pop duo, perform. This was a rare night off for Ms. Lauper, who has had the busiest and most creatively diverse year of her career. Backstage she told the duo, Tegan and Sara Quin, about her latest projects: a memoir, published in September; a reality series (her second, after a stint on “Celebrity Apprentice”), focused on her life on tour and with her family, called “Still So Unusual,” for the WE channel; and, most pressingly, the Broadway version of “Kinky Boots” (adapted from the 2005 movie), for which Ms. Lauper composed the music, a first for her.

Tegan and Sara were duly impressed. “All we talk about since we toured with you is how hot you are and how good you sound,” Tegan said. Onstage they covered one of her hits, “When You Were Mine,” dedicating it to her; it influenced them as kids, they explained. In the audience Ms. Lauper teared up, while remaining highly enthused. “This is awesome, it’s awesome!” she crowed, and sent out a tweet saying the same.

Ms. Lauper has been wavering on the border of teary and exuberant a lot lately, particularly with regard to “Kinky Boots.” Though she helped produce her own records and wrote a slew of radio hits, selling over 40 million albums, she is not perceived as a composer. “Kinky Boots,” with songs in styles that range from pop to funk to new wave to tango, with highly personal lyrics and several standout ballads, may change all that, potentially paving the way for another phase in her career. In previews now and due to open on April 4, it’s the culmination of four years of work, a collaborative back and forth among Ms. Lauper; the director, Jerry Mitchell; and the book writer, Harvey Fierstein. But getting top billing without having to sing onstage has made her nervous, she admitted.

It was Mr. Fierstein who approached her for the job. “I was minding my own business, washing the dishes,” Ms. Lauper said. “And Harvey called and said” — imagine her doing Mr. Fierstein’s distinctive rasp here — “ ‘What are you doing?’ ”

Mr. Fierstein, who worked on “Kinky Boots” in between writing another hit Broadway musical, “Newsies,” and a play, said he saw in the adaptation an opportunity to work with someone with a big musical range, “somebody who could write club music,” he said, along with show tunes. (Even before a tryout run in Chicago a remix of a number from the show, “Sex Is in the Heel,” made the Top 10 on the Billboard club charts, the first Broadway tune to do so in 25 years.)

The story, about a struggling English shoe factory that is saved when the owner decides to partner with a drag queen and design fabulous heels for her compatriots, also seemed as if it was in the Lauper wheelhouse, Mr. Fierstein said. (“The shoes alone!” she said.) Both found resonance in the show’s themes, of uncovering identity, acceptance and creativity as an outlet for change.

Photo

Cyndi LauperCredit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

“Most pop stars come to you and say: ‘Oh you want to write a Broadway show. Here’s all my songs. Have a good time.’ Cyndi came in and did” the work, Mr. Fierstein said, adding an expletive for good measure. Ms. Lauper reworked the material once the cast, which includes Stark Sands (“American Idiot”) in the role of factory owner and Billy Porter (“Dreamgirls”) as the drag queen Lola, materialized. “Most composers don’t do that either,” Mr. Fierstein said. “Most composers are like, ‘This is what I wrote.’ ”

They have been friends since Ms. Lauper sang “True Colors” for Mr. Fierstein when he was honored by the AIDS charity amfAR in 2003. Adopted as a gay anthem, the song gave rise to her nonprofit foundation of the same name. Ms. Lauper has long been an outspoken advocate of what she calls “the community”: She performed at the Human Rights Campaign’s Out for Equality ball at both Obama inaugurations, and in 2011 she helped open a residence in Harlem for homeless gay and transgender youth.

“I knew she would get the message of the outsider,” Mr. Fierstein said, explaining their friendship. “We come from similar backgrounds: She’s from Queens, I’m from Brooklyn. She had her first album cover outside the wax museum of Coney Island,” for “She’s So Unusual,” her 1983 solo debut, which produced four Top 5 Billboard hits, including “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “She Bop” and “Time After Time.”

“I wrote a whole play about that place,” Mr. Fierstein said. “We made our splash around the same time, early 1980s. There’s an affinity there.”

That didn’t mean the collaboration was easy. In a work marriage straight out of a camp fantasy, they took to referring to each other as characters from “Mommie Dearest.”

“I’d call her up and say: ‘Christina, I need those lyrics. Where are those lyrics, Christina?’ ” Mr. Fierstein said. “I can’t sing my daughter’s praises loud enough. I had to torture her to get her to do what I wanted her to do.”

Her inspiration for the music came first from the Broadway albums she listened to growing up in Ozone Park — her mother’s copies of “South Pacific” and “West Side Story.” But the 15 songs hint at her magpie sensibility. More than many veteran musicians her age — she will be 60 in June — she is catholic in her influences, referring to of-the-moment artists like Lana Del Rey in the same breath as Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” A comic number, “The History of Wrong Guys,” that could have been one of her 1980s hits, took its title from a line in “Kung Fu Panda.”

“She’s got the mind of a teenager, and she’s always wanting to know what’s the next big thing, what’s the next exciting thing,” said Alan Cumming, another friend. When they were on Broadway together in “Threepenny Opera” in 2006, they were such fixtures at gay clubs that it became a night life parlor game: “Every time you see Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper, take a shot,” Mr. Cumming recalled.

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Billy Porter, left, and Stark Sands in Broadway’s “Kinky Boots,” with music composed by Cyndi Lauper.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

But Ms. Lauper also has a steely stage ethic. She’s meticulous about doing vocal exercises — she still works with a coach — and vigilant about her audio. When she and Mr. Cumming performed at the Tonys, she brought her own sound guy, he recalled. “She completely understands every aspect of being a performer,” from lighting to fashion, Mr. Cumming said. “She’s got such an innate sense of theatricality, and also she’s very about story in her songs, so I think this is a real natural route for her,” he added of her Broadway turn. She has been putting in every effort, fine-tuning orchestration and sitting on the floor in the balcony during previews to make sure the sound is right.

Mr. Fierstein is hopeful that “Kinky Boots” will cement Ms. Lauper as an artist with a singular vision. “Our business is just so hard on women, and she’s had to battle to be taken seriously, not because she’s a woman but a woman with that accent and that voice and that persona of ‘Look at me, I’m just having a good time,’ ” he said. “And that’s not who Cyndi is. She’s battled the sexism of the recording industry, of the world.”

It started early: Ms. Lauper was on-message as a feminist from her first days as a singer, with the band Blue Angel. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” her breakout as a solo act, was an intentionally rebellious sing-a-long, and in the video she made sure to have a range of ethnicities and sizes long before that was de rigueur. Her punky look too made a lasting imprint: Lady Gaga is a fan. Even as she hammed it up with professional wrestlers in her videos in the ’80s, Ms. Lauper, then in her 30s, kept her family close, also casting her mother, sister and aunts. She married the actor David Thornton in 1991; they have a 15-year-old son, Declyn, a natural star of the WE reality show. Ms. Lauper is even an occasional hockey mom.

Though there are plenty of hooky, rousing numbers, the emotional heart of “Kinky Boots” is several ballads about the weight of parental expectations. “All I want people to understand is when you have a child, you have to help them be who they are and who they want to be,” Ms. Lauper said. In person she is equal parts maternal and feisty, worrying over late-night cabs and colds while declaring that so-and-so is a “beeyotch.”

She earned a Grammy as best new artist for “She’s So Unusual” and an Emmy for a guest stint on “Mad About You.” Her latest album, “Memphis Blues,” in 2010, spent 14 weeks at No. 1 on the blues chart. Still, she did not expect to be so busy now.

“They always tell me, ‘Look, if you want to be successful, you take on several things, and one of them will pan out,’ so that’s what I did,” she said. “I didn’t know all three were going to work out. I was just trying to be reasonable and diversify. So it all kind of happened at once. Now I have psoriasis.”

What Ms. Lauper does not have, amazingly enough after more than 30 years in show business, is a filter. As she puts it in her memoir, written with Jancee Dunn, she’s always saying “the wrong things to the right people.”

But criticism does not faze her; her career is a lesson in defying expectations. “I ain’t going to give up,” she said. “Every time you think I’m one place, I’m going to show up someplace else.”

You can’t mess with her, she added, in tartier language. “I come prehated. Take your best shot.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2013, on page AR7 of the New York edition with the headline: So Unusual for a Theater Tunesmith. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe